The Cathedral Part 45

"Very well, then. You may laugh as you please. You may think it all a very good joke. I tell you it is not. We are enemies, enemies from this moment.

You have never been anything _but_ my enemy."

"Do take care, Archdeacon, or you really _will_ be out of the carriage."

"Very well. I will get out of it. I refuse to drive with you another step.

I refuse. I refuse."

"But you can't walk. It's six miles."

"I will walk! I will walk! Stop and let me get out! Stop, I say!"

But Ba.s.sett who, according to his back, was as innocent of any dispute as the small birds on the neighbouring tree, drove on.

"Stop, I say. Can't you hear?" The Archdeacon plunged forward and pulled Ba.s.sett by the collar. "Stop! Stop!" The wagonette abruptly stopped.

Ba.s.sett's amazed face, two wide eyes in a creased and crumpled surface, peered round.

"It's war, I tell you. War!" Brandon climbed out.

"But listen, Archdeacon! You can't!"

"Drive on! Drive on!" cried Brandon, standing in the road and shaking his umbrella.

The wagonette drove on. It disappeared over the ledge of the hill.

There was a sudden silence. Brandon's anger pounded up into his head in great waves of constricting pa.s.sion. These gradually faded. His knees were trembling beneath him. There were new sounds--birds singing, a tiny breeze rustling the hedges. No living soul in sight. He had suddenly a strange impulse to shed tears. What had he been saying? What had he been doing? He did not know what he had said. Another of his tempers....

The pain attacked his head--like a sword, like a sword.

He found a stone and sat down upon it. The pain invaded him like an active personal enemy. Down the road it seemed to him figures were moving--Hogg, Davray--that other world--the dust rose in little clouds.

What had he been doing? His head! Where did this pain come from?

He felt old and sick and weak. He wanted to be at home. Slowly he began to climb the hill. An enemy, silent and triumphant, seemed to step behind him.

Book III

Jubilee

Chapter I

June 17, Thursday: Antic.i.p.ation

It must certainly be difficult for chroniclers of contemporary history to determine significant dates to define the beginning and end of succeeding periods. But I fancy that any fellow-citizen of mine, if he thinks for a moment, will agree with me that that Jubilee Summer of 1897 was the last manifestation in our town of the separate individual Polchester spirit, of the old spirit that had dwelt in its streets and informed its walls and roofs for hundreds of years past, something as separate and distinct as the smells of Seatown, the chime of the Cathedral bells, the cawing of the Cathedral rooks in the Precinct Elms.

An interesting and, to one reader at least, a pathetic history might be written of the decline and death of that same spirit--not in Polchester alone, but in many another small English town. From the Boer War of 1899 to the Great War of 1914 stretches that destructive period; the agents of that destruction, the new moneyed cla.s.ses, the telephone, the telegram, the motor, and last of all, the cinema.

Destruction? That is, perhaps, too strong a word. We know that that is simply the stepping from one stage to another of the eternal, the immortal cycle. The little hamlet embowered in its protecting trees, defended by its beloved hills, the Rock rising gaunt and naked in its midst; then the Cathedral, the Monks, the Baron's Castle, the feudal rule; then the mighty Bishops and the vast all-encircling power of the Church; then the new merchant age, the Elizabethan salt of adventure; then the cosy seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with their domesticities, their little cultures, their comfortable religion, their stay-at-home unimaginative festivities.

Throughout the nineteenth century that spirit lingers, gently repulsing the outside world, reproving new doctrine, repressing new movement...and the Rock and the Cathedral wait their hours, watching the great sea that, far on the horizon, is bathing its d.y.k.es and flooding the distant fields, knowing that the waves are rising higher and higher, and will at last, with full volume, leap upon these little pastures, these green-clad valleys, these tiny hills. And in that day only the Cathedral and the Rock will stand out above the flood.

And this was a Polchester Jubilee. There may have been some consciousness of that little old woman driving in her carriage through the London streets, but in the main the Town suddenly took possession, cried aloud that these festivities were for Herself, that for a week at least the Town would a.s.sert Herself, bringing into Her celebration the Cathedral that was her chief glory, but of whom, nevertheless, she was afraid; the Rock upon which she was built, that never changed, the country that surrounded and supported her, the wild men who had belonged to her from time immemorial, the River that encircled her.

That week seemed to many, on looking back, a strangely mad time, days informed with a wildness for which there was no discernible reason--men and women and children were seized that week with some licence that they loved while it lasted, but that they looked back upon with fear when it was over. What had come over them? Who had been grinning at them?

The strange things that occurred that week seemed to have no individual agent. No one was responsible. But life, after that week, was for many people in the town never quite the same again.

On the afternoon of Thursday, June 17, Ronder stood at the window of his study and looked down upon the little orchard, the blazing flowers, the red garden-wall, and the tree-tops on the descending hill, all glazed and sparkling under the hot afternoon sun. As he looked down, seeing nothing, sunk deeply in his own thoughts, he was aware of extreme moral and spiritual discomfort. He moved back from the window, making with his fingers a little gesture of discontent and irritation. He paced his room, stopping absent-mindedly once and again to push in a book that protruded from the shelves, staying to finger things on his writing-table, jolting against a chair with his foot as he moved. At last he flung himself into his deep leather chair and stared fixedly at an old faded silk fire-guard, with its shadowy flowers and dim purple silk, seeing it not at all.

He was angry, and of all things in the world that he hated, he hated most to be that. He had been angry now for several weeks, and, as though it had been a heavy cold that had descended upon him, he woke up every morning expecting to find that his anger had departed--but it had not departed; it showed no signs whatever of departing.

As he sat there he was not thinking of the Jubilee, the one thought at that time of every living soul in Polchester, man, woman and child--he was thinking of no one but Brandon, with whom, to his own deep disgust, he was at last implacably, remorselessly, angry. How many years ago now he had decided that anger and hatred were emotions that every wise man, at all cost to his pride, his impatience, his self-confidence, avoided.

Everything could be better achieved without these weaknesses, and for many years he had tutored and trained himself until, at last, he had reached this fine height of superiority. From that height he had suddenly fallen.

It was now three weeks since that luncheon at Carpledon, and in one way or another the quarrel on the road home--the absurd and ludicrous quarrel-- had become known to the whole town. Had Brandon revealed it? Or possibly the coachman? Whoever it was, every one now knew and laughed. Laughed! It was that for which Ronder would never forgive Brandon. The man with his childish temper and monstrous conceit had made him into a ludicrous figure. It was true that they were laughing, it seemed, more at Brandon than at himself, but the whole scene was farcical. But beyond this, that incident, trivial though it might be in itself, had thrown the relations.h.i.+p of the two men into dazzling prominence. It was as though they had been publicly announced as antagonists, and now, stripped and prepared, ringed in by the breathless Town, must vulgarly afford the roughs of the place the fistic exhibition of their lives. It was the publicity that Ronder detested. He had not disliked Brandon--he had merely despised him, and he had taken an infinite pleasure in furthering schemes and ambitions, a little underground maybe, but all for the final benefit of the Town.

And now the blundering fool had brought this blaze down upon them, was indeed rus.h.i.+ng round and screaming at his antagonist, shouting to any one who would hear that Ronder was a blackguard and a public menace. It had been whispered--from what source again Ronder did not know--that it was through Ronder's influence that young Falk Brandon had run off to Town with Hogg's daughter. The boy thought the world of Ronder, it was said, and had been to see him and ask his advice. Ronder knew that Brandon had heard this story and was publicly declaring that Ronder had ruined his son.

Finally the two men were brought into sharp rivalry over the Pybus living.

Over that, too, the town, or at any rate the Cathedral section of it, was in two camps. Here, too, Brandon's vociferous publicity had made privacy impossible.

Ronder was ashamed, as though his rotund body had been suddenly exposed in all its obese nakedness before the a.s.sembled citizens of Polchester. In this public quarrel he was not in his element; forces were rising in him that he distrusted and feared.

People were laughing...for that he would never forgive Brandon so long as he lived.

On this particular afternoon he was about to close the window and try to work at his sermon when some one knocked at his door.

"Come in," he said impatiently. The maid appeared.

"Please, sir, there's some one would like to speak to you."

"Who is it?"

"She gave her name as Miss Milton, sir."

He paused, looking down at his papers. "She said she wouldn't keep you more than a moment, sir."

"Very well. I'll see her."

Fate pus.h.i.+ng him again. Why should this woman come to him? How could any one say that any of the steps that he had taken in this affair had been his fault? Why, he had had nothing whatever to do with them!